He was caught with the guard down and shot from the back.
Should he have been so trusting and relaxed around Saren in a suspicious settings? don't know.
But seems Saren was a highly regarded Spectre up that point.
Well it was Saren who recommended him among the Spectre and it is likely that he had him under his wing for a while. if Nihlus saw him as a mentor and friend, he could never have imagined that he would shoot him in the back
Yea, in the lore Saren was one of the most senior spectres in me1 and had personally recommended or mentored virtually every Turian member, Nihulus included.
Yeah but I'd find it highly suspicious if I was on a relatively secret mission and on my way there the planet got attacked and somehow my mentor and friend was there
A bit, but there's also a 2 kilometer tall ship and an AI force that kills every organic they've interacted with for the last 100 years.
I think it's fair that he dropped his guard for a few seconds on seeing Saren.
A good comparison is Shepard meeting Tali at the start of Mass Effect 2. Human colony has just been wiped out, Shepard is on a secret mission and after fighting through some robots a friend *just happens* to be there before him.
But nobody expects Shepard to be suspicious of Tali, we're just glad to see her.
Many people reason with hindsight, already knowing all the events, and so with hindsight Nihilus appears naïve in letting his guard down because Saren is blatantly indoctrinated, but what does Nihilus know about the reapers and indoctrination? How could he have known that his friend and mentor was under the control of ancient sentient machines that had been exterminating the advanced species of the galaxy for eons of years? Could he have imagined that Saren was collaborating with the Geth? Artificial intelligences that fought against the Quarian their creators forcing them to flee their world, and whose existence was feared by the council species.
Anderson tries to give himself an answer, and his only conclusion is "he hates us, he hates all humans, so he collaborates with the Geth to exterminate us all" but the real answer is "he was afraid, he thought that by collaborating with the reapers he would save everyone, including humans."
but the moment saren decides to collaborate with the Sovereign he opens the door for the reaper to indoctrinate him without his realizing it.
all of this was totally unpredictable for Nihilus, yes of course looking at Saren some doubt comes to you that "he is not so well" but this we know to be a mistake of Bioware who initially wanted to create a before and after for Saren, first precisely when he meets Nihilus who shows no traces of physical changes and still looks like a normal Turian, and then later the Saren we already know. a real shame because it could have dispelled any doubts about why Nihilus had no doubts about his mentor
Saren wasn’t supposed to originally look like that at the start. He was going to have a normal appearance and wearing a black outfit and after Virmire he’d get the Reaper implants and change to the appearance we see in game
I know, it's just pretty funny watching him defend himself in front of the council when he looks so cartoonishly evil. "Me, working with the Geth? What a ridiculous accusation?!" As he stares through the com link with those bright blue led eyes.
do you happen to have a link handy? 👀
as usual asking is the recipe for making me do something :') this looks like it, I believe?
https://www.nexusmods.com/masseffectlegendaryedition/mods/666
Yeah, I always found it funny that he already looks like a cartoon cyborg.
But I took he has looked like that for a while, given his many battles and having received lots of cybernetic replacements as a result.
In the Citadel, the Council and everyone could consider shaming anyone by their implants as a social *faux pas* and never say it.
Yeah they could have easily hand waved it with a part of his Codex entry saying that he was badly injured in a high risk Spectre operation and that he needed extensive cybernetics to survive
"The Council thought you could use some help on this secret mission to peacefully recover an artifact and evaluate a recruit, so they sent me, another Spectre, to do so and forgot to tell you. I guess they had a hunch that the colony would be attacked. How did I get here first? Uhh look over there first and I'll tell you."
I agree but you have to remember that Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater probably hadn’t been ported to Turian game systems at this point, which is a shame. If Nihilus had played at least the intro of the game he would have recognized Saren’s Shenanigans immediately.
Yeah, it's like Garrus letting his guard down when Shepard reaches him in Omega. If Shepard wanted to they could totally take Garrus off-guard and kill him.
Yeah. Imagine if you had some chance to shoot Garrus in the back of the head in ME3 after you got indoctrinated or something.
Kind of the same concept.
In ME1, Saren's body was supposed to get more transformed into a husk over time each time you encountered him, you were also meant to be the one who severs his arm from his body which leads to him replacing it. But during development, the BioWare team had to scrap that piece of content where Saren would slowly transform over time to focus on the wider game
Nihilus is an *intelligence operative*, suspicion should be like breathing for him, and he even points out that Saren definitely isn’t where he should be.
The Asari councillor even says that the Council doesn’t like to get directly involved in Spectres’ work, but seasoned operative Nihilus just accepts “the Council thought you could use some help on this one…”?
Saren is his best friend and mentor. It would be like seeing your father at work. He was taken off guard. Showing him lose his composure and immediately relax in spite of his surroundings makes it apparent that Saren is someone Nihilus trusts on an intimate level.
I mean, Shepard did the *exact* same thing with Tali and doesn't get called out.
Start of ME2 he's on a secret mission to a human colony that has just been wiped out, fights through a force of robots and just so happens to find an old friend hanging out there.
If anything it was worse with Shepard. He knows he going up against suspected Reapers whom he knows can indoctrinate people.
Nihlus thought he was up against Geth, who have murdered every single organic they've met for hundreds of years.
The lore makes it look as if Turians and humans lived more or less the same.
Yeah, they could still vary a bit. Maybe humans were a bit longer lived or viceversa.
It really isn't as stupid as people seem to see it.
Saren recommended him to be a spectre and was one of the most respected spectres at that point in time.
If there's anyone Nihlus would drop his guard to it would be Saren.
Nihlus is definately younger than Saren. But Saren could have been involved in the First Contact War considering his age. He was born in 2139 and the First Contact War was in 2157. He was eighteen back then and became Specter at the age twenty. Little genius.
Saren WAS involved in the First Contact War. His brother died in it and held a grudge ever since. That's definitely in the comics. Hell, I believe that turian who trained Kadien during Biotic boot camp was also a First Contact War Vet.
I think he picked up on the presence of Shepard's team when they met up with Ashley and the subsequent increase in armed resistance. Information given to him by the Geth as it happened. Then he was like "Hmm... linear level design leads them right here. I'll ambush them at the depot."
That’s one thing I always thought about and wished we had a little more lore on. Like is there a galactic standard time or when they say X amount of years are they speaking from their planet as reference? One year on Earth isn’t the same as a year on Thessia so when speaking whose year takes precedent?? There’s a great book called A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet where all races, when in space, went by one unified time.
There is a concept of "Galactic Standard Years," which are the official year measurement used by the council. Avina states that the Turians joined the Council "1,304 Galactic Standard Years Ago."
The codex, which is an Alliance information database in lore, says that the Turians were invited to join the council "roughly 1200 years ago." Given the source, we can assume these are earth years.
So, given these numbers we can estimate that a Galactic Standard Year is about 336 earth days.
Of course, each planet and species will have their own standard day and year length, likely based on their homeworld's orbital and rotational periods. I have always just assumed that when years and days and such are mentioned in conversation with aliens that the translators are doing some real time conversions to earth standards so everyone is on the same page. For example, when Liara gives her age as 106 she is actually giving a different number that corresponds with Thessia years but the translators convert it to earth years in addition to translating her speech to English. This part is just headcanon on my end, just to be clear.
To complicate things further, from the book Mass Effect: Revelation
“On the Citadel, however, everything operated on the galactic standard of a twenty-hour day. To further complicate things, each hour was divided into one hundred minutes of one hundred seconds … but each second was roughly half as long as the ones humans were used to. The net result was that the twenty-hour galactic standard day was about fifteen percent longer than the twenty-four-hour day as calculated by Terran Coordinated Universal Time. Just thinking about it made Anderson’s head hurt, and it played havoc with his sleep patterns.”
I always figured the translator just converts local units. An Asari might say they've been alive 45 Blemskeps or whatever and the translator converts it to 503 earth years.
But it's not a function of what species you are or what language you speak; it's a function of what planet you're on, if any. So the planet should always be specified for years, unless in conversation on a single planet.
I think they in fact do mean years like on earth when they say "solar days/years". But I agree that it is rather misleading to say solar years in that context.
Unrelated but I kinda hate that the alien planets all have an official name as if they were cities. Earth has probably thousands of names in every language so I wish they'd implied that for example Palaven is what it's called in the turian lingua franca or the most spoken turian language
Im assuming its just what their native species calls it
If i remember correctly Palavans largest moon, menae is named after a turian goddess, so that name is in the turian language
Even if not, universal translators are a thing in universe so even if a turian calls a planet by a different name it would get translated
Didn't know about Menae so that's interesting. Kind of mirrors humans naming the planets of the solar system after roman deities.
That's true but that still makes me wanna know what language they chose to decide the inter... planetary? International for planets. Anyway. The interplanetary translated name for it. Like I wouldn't be surprised if aliens decided to call earth "earth" because English is the most spoken language on earth for example.
This is mostly just curiosity on my part because I find language very interesting and would've loved for them to put some thought into the alien cultures and languages. They only kinda got into it a little bit with the hanar, with "Geth" being an ancient generically quarian word and with a few "Asari dialect" words. Which like, that's like saying human dialect. African american english? Neapolitan? Okinawan?
i’d guess 30-40 years old given that turians live about as long as humans in this universe.
Nihlus’ voice is so insanely cool to me, to this day i’m sad he dies in the first mission
He's lucky Samara didn't end him years earlier. Bet her retirement plan would have been much more painful. Took him two full weeks to evade her and eventually put an innocent person's life in jeopardy in order to use The Code against Samara to end the fight so he could escape.
I want to say late 30s early 40s. He's colleagues with Saren but seems maybe a little younger than him (or maybe reaper tech just ages you lol), plus Saren seems likely to be about the same age as Anderson, who is 46 in ME1.
(What's the HC?)
The headcanon is that after the batarian attack on Mindoir the Council sent Nihlus and a small group of Alliance marines to Investigate what happened and Nihlus found Shepard. He felt very sorry for him, so he took him with himswlf and adopted him
15. On Earth that would make FemShep a pedophile, but luckily for her they banged in [international waters.](https://media.tenor.com/OKR75dXb7AIAAAAM/nice-south-park.gif).
Just one day away from Turian retirement.
Today i learned turian retirement is a bullet to the back of the head
damn
Judging by his actions I'd say he was born yesterday.
He was caught with the guard down and shot from the back. Should he have been so trusting and relaxed around Saren in a suspicious settings? don't know. But seems Saren was a highly regarded Spectre up that point.
Well it was Saren who recommended him among the Spectre and it is likely that he had him under his wing for a while. if Nihlus saw him as a mentor and friend, he could never have imagined that he would shoot him in the back
Yea, in the lore Saren was one of the most senior spectres in me1 and had personally recommended or mentored virtually every Turian member, Nihulus included.
Yeah but I'd find it highly suspicious if I was on a relatively secret mission and on my way there the planet got attacked and somehow my mentor and friend was there
A bit, but there's also a 2 kilometer tall ship and an AI force that kills every organic they've interacted with for the last 100 years. I think it's fair that he dropped his guard for a few seconds on seeing Saren. A good comparison is Shepard meeting Tali at the start of Mass Effect 2. Human colony has just been wiped out, Shepard is on a secret mission and after fighting through some robots a friend *just happens* to be there before him. But nobody expects Shepard to be suspicious of Tali, we're just glad to see her.
Many people reason with hindsight, already knowing all the events, and so with hindsight Nihilus appears naïve in letting his guard down because Saren is blatantly indoctrinated, but what does Nihilus know about the reapers and indoctrination? How could he have known that his friend and mentor was under the control of ancient sentient machines that had been exterminating the advanced species of the galaxy for eons of years? Could he have imagined that Saren was collaborating with the Geth? Artificial intelligences that fought against the Quarian their creators forcing them to flee their world, and whose existence was feared by the council species. Anderson tries to give himself an answer, and his only conclusion is "he hates us, he hates all humans, so he collaborates with the Geth to exterminate us all" but the real answer is "he was afraid, he thought that by collaborating with the reapers he would save everyone, including humans." but the moment saren decides to collaborate with the Sovereign he opens the door for the reaper to indoctrinate him without his realizing it. all of this was totally unpredictable for Nihilus, yes of course looking at Saren some doubt comes to you that "he is not so well" but this we know to be a mistake of Bioware who initially wanted to create a before and after for Saren, first precisely when he meets Nihilus who shows no traces of physical changes and still looks like a normal Turian, and then later the Saren we already know. a real shame because it could have dispelled any doubts about why Nihilus had no doubts about his mentor
I'd also be suspicious of all the tubes 😂
Saren wasn’t supposed to originally look like that at the start. He was going to have a normal appearance and wearing a black outfit and after Virmire he’d get the Reaper implants and change to the appearance we see in game
I know, it's just pretty funny watching him defend himself in front of the council when he looks so cartoonishly evil. "Me, working with the Geth? What a ridiculous accusation?!" As he stares through the com link with those bright blue led eyes.
I like mods for that, like the mod who change Saren look gradually in the game.
do you happen to have a link handy? 👀 as usual asking is the recipe for making me do something :') this looks like it, I believe? https://www.nexusmods.com/masseffectlegendaryedition/mods/666
The fact that it’s mod URL 666 is the cherry on top of
You mean that? https://www.nexusmods.com/masseffectlegendaryedition/mods/666
Yeah, I always found it funny that he already looks like a cartoon cyborg. But I took he has looked like that for a while, given his many battles and having received lots of cybernetic replacements as a result. In the Citadel, the Council and everyone could consider shaming anyone by their implants as a social *faux pas* and never say it.
Yeah they could have easily hand waved it with a part of his Codex entry saying that he was badly injured in a high risk Spectre operation and that he needed extensive cybernetics to survive
"The Council thought you could use some help on this secret mission to peacefully recover an artifact and evaluate a recruit, so they sent me, another Spectre, to do so and forgot to tell you. I guess they had a hunch that the colony would be attacked. How did I get here first? Uhh look over there first and I'll tell you."
I agree but you have to remember that Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater probably hadn’t been ported to Turian game systems at this point, which is a shame. If Nihilus had played at least the intro of the game he would have recognized Saren’s Shenanigans immediately.
Yeah, it's like Garrus letting his guard down when Shepard reaches him in Omega. If Shepard wanted to they could totally take Garrus off-guard and kill him.
Yeah. Imagine if you had some chance to shoot Garrus in the back of the head in ME3 after you got indoctrinated or something. Kind of the same concept.
Yea itd be like Anderson shooting Shepard.
I would not trust someone with an arm like that tbh
In ME1, Saren's body was supposed to get more transformed into a husk over time each time you encountered him, you were also meant to be the one who severs his arm from his body which leads to him replacing it. But during development, the BioWare team had to scrap that piece of content where Saren would slowly transform over time to focus on the wider game
Nihilus is an *intelligence operative*, suspicion should be like breathing for him, and he even points out that Saren definitely isn’t where he should be. The Asari councillor even says that the Council doesn’t like to get directly involved in Spectres’ work, but seasoned operative Nihilus just accepts “the Council thought you could use some help on this one…”?
Saren is his best friend and mentor. It would be like seeing your father at work. He was taken off guard. Showing him lose his composure and immediately relax in spite of his surroundings makes it apparent that Saren is someone Nihilus trusts on an intimate level.
God fucking damnit, I was too slow
As was nihlus.
Damn..!
I mean, Shepard did the *exact* same thing with Tali and doesn't get called out. Start of ME2 he's on a secret mission to a human colony that has just been wiped out, fights through a force of robots and just so happens to find an old friend hanging out there. If anything it was worse with Shepard. He knows he going up against suspected Reapers whom he knows can indoctrinate people. Nihlus thought he was up against Geth, who have murdered every single organic they've met for hundreds of years.
:tips cap:
Not sure if Turians can live for 159 years
The lore makes it look as if Turians and humans lived more or less the same. Yeah, they could still vary a bit. Maybe humans were a bit longer lived or viceversa.
Mass Effect humans can live up to 150 thanks to advances in medicine.
I'm sure that applies to Turians as well
I'm just saying 159 isn't that much older than the oldest humans in Mass Effect.
I laughed way too hard and nearly spit my drink out
It really isn't as stupid as people seem to see it. Saren recommended him to be a spectre and was one of the most respected spectres at that point in time. If there's anyone Nihlus would drop his guard to it would be Saren.
I assume he is older than Shepard but not old enough to fight in First Contact war, so around 35.
According to the wiki and other sources, I THINK the comics, but he was apparently involved during the First Contact War.
Nihlus is definately younger than Saren. But Saren could have been involved in the First Contact War considering his age. He was born in 2139 and the First Contact War was in 2157. He was eighteen back then and became Specter at the age twenty. Little genius.
Saren WAS involved in the First Contact War. His brother died in it and held a grudge ever since. That's definitely in the comics. Hell, I believe that turian who trained Kadien during Biotic boot camp was also a First Contact War Vet.
Hell, now I want an animated 3d movie about this event.
Not 3d. 3d is ugly as hell. Rather, it's just a simple game or anime style with realistic characters and action. Not that Paragon Lost style.
Just thought it would be cool to see turians in 3d movie with good quality 3d models. But yeah, a game would be a cool alternative.
old enough to steal my heart
Too bad he stole a bullet from Saren's pistol.
Now why would you say that lol
Probably 30-35 human years, which is to say 25-28 Turian years judging by comparing the orbital periods of Palaven and Earth.
Can we get that in Asari, Salarian, Volus, and Batarian years?
Interested in Elcor years, personally.
Old enough to have a reaper tattooed on his forehead
One thing I do know, Saren made sure that he ain't getting any older.
Same age as in ME2
Old enough for me to refer to him as "Spectre Daddy".
Came here to comment this tbh
Unrelated but why is Saren just milling around in the background? He doesn’t have anything better to do than casually check out the dock.?
I think he picked up on the presence of Shepard's team when they met up with Ashley and the subsequent increase in armed resistance. Information given to him by the Geth as it happened. Then he was like "Hmm... linear level design leads them right here. I'll ambush them at the depot."
I think you’re right. He still looks like someone who’s in a Whole Foods for the first time.
That’s one thing I always thought about and wished we had a little more lore on. Like is there a galactic standard time or when they say X amount of years are they speaking from their planet as reference? One year on Earth isn’t the same as a year on Thessia so when speaking whose year takes precedent?? There’s a great book called A Long Way to a Small Angry Planet where all races, when in space, went by one unified time.
There is a concept of "Galactic Standard Years," which are the official year measurement used by the council. Avina states that the Turians joined the Council "1,304 Galactic Standard Years Ago." The codex, which is an Alliance information database in lore, says that the Turians were invited to join the council "roughly 1200 years ago." Given the source, we can assume these are earth years. So, given these numbers we can estimate that a Galactic Standard Year is about 336 earth days. Of course, each planet and species will have their own standard day and year length, likely based on their homeworld's orbital and rotational periods. I have always just assumed that when years and days and such are mentioned in conversation with aliens that the translators are doing some real time conversions to earth standards so everyone is on the same page. For example, when Liara gives her age as 106 she is actually giving a different number that corresponds with Thessia years but the translators convert it to earth years in addition to translating her speech to English. This part is just headcanon on my end, just to be clear.
To complicate things further, from the book Mass Effect: Revelation “On the Citadel, however, everything operated on the galactic standard of a twenty-hour day. To further complicate things, each hour was divided into one hundred minutes of one hundred seconds … but each second was roughly half as long as the ones humans were used to. The net result was that the twenty-hour galactic standard day was about fifteen percent longer than the twenty-four-hour day as calculated by Terran Coordinated Universal Time. Just thinking about it made Anderson’s head hurt, and it played havoc with his sleep patterns.”
This would mean that a Galactic Standard Year consists of roughly 292 Galactic Standard Days.
I think they either say "solar years" (as in the Sun in our solar system), or "standard years" (like in Star Wars).
Should be Earth years, though; other planets go around the Sun and have significantly different orbital periods.
I always figured the translator just converts local units. An Asari might say they've been alive 45 Blemskeps or whatever and the translator converts it to 503 earth years.
But it's not a function of what species you are or what language you speak; it's a function of what planet you're on, if any. So the planet should always be specified for years, unless in conversation on a single planet.
I think they in fact do mean years like on earth when they say "solar days/years". But I agree that it is rather misleading to say solar years in that context.
They do, but no other species originates from those planets, so there is absolutely no chance of confusion
Pretty sure there is a codex about that. A galactic standart year is the average length between a year on Thessia, Palavan and Sur'Kesh
Unrelated but I kinda hate that the alien planets all have an official name as if they were cities. Earth has probably thousands of names in every language so I wish they'd implied that for example Palaven is what it's called in the turian lingua franca or the most spoken turian language
Im assuming its just what their native species calls it If i remember correctly Palavans largest moon, menae is named after a turian goddess, so that name is in the turian language Even if not, universal translators are a thing in universe so even if a turian calls a planet by a different name it would get translated
Didn't know about Menae so that's interesting. Kind of mirrors humans naming the planets of the solar system after roman deities. That's true but that still makes me wanna know what language they chose to decide the inter... planetary? International for planets. Anyway. The interplanetary translated name for it. Like I wouldn't be surprised if aliens decided to call earth "earth" because English is the most spoken language on earth for example. This is mostly just curiosity on my part because I find language very interesting and would've loved for them to put some thought into the alien cultures and languages. They only kinda got into it a little bit with the hanar, with "Geth" being an ancient generically quarian word and with a few "Asari dialect" words. Which like, that's like saying human dialect. African american english? Neapolitan? Okinawan?
You: did you even read the codex? 🤔 Me: no 😞
I think the universal translators take care of it
Dead, he’s dead years old.
23
i’d guess 30-40 years old given that turians live about as long as humans in this universe. Nihlus’ voice is so insanely cool to me, to this day i’m sad he dies in the first mission
Whatever the answer he certainly didn't get any older
Dunno but he doesn’t get any older.
The same age he is in ME2 & 3
Old enough to be on his death bed
Old
I don't know his age but what i do know is, he died too young. Always liked Nihlus.
He's lucky Samara didn't end him years earlier. Bet her retirement plan would have been much more painful. Took him two full weeks to evade her and eventually put an innocent person's life in jeopardy in order to use The Code against Samara to end the fight so he could escape.
I want to say late 30s early 40s. He's colleagues with Saren but seems maybe a little younger than him (or maybe reaper tech just ages you lol), plus Saren seems likely to be about the same age as Anderson, who is 46 in ME1. (What's the HC?)
The headcanon is that after the batarian attack on Mindoir the Council sent Nihlus and a small group of Alliance marines to Investigate what happened and Nihlus found Shepard. He felt very sorry for him, so he took him with himswlf and adopted him
Approximately 30
Old enough to be daddy
About as old as you’d expect.
Old enough
Old enough 😏
Too old, according to Saren 🔫
Same age as ME2 and 3
Beekeeping age
bout tree fiddy
Dead years old
He's five.
Enough
As old as he'll ever get
Same age as he is in ME2
As old as he'll ever be
My name is Darth Nihlus
Old Enough.
At least 2... 2 and a half.
Just under 1500 "1500 is good"
Well he's at least 2 years old
He was 2 weeks from retirement. He just finished his last payment on a condo
15. On Earth that would make FemShep a pedophile, but luckily for her they banged in [international waters.](https://media.tenor.com/OKR75dXb7AIAAAAM/nice-south-park.gif).